On Sept. 17, mere hours after Brendan Carr, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), threatened government action against ABC because of remarks he found offensive on Jimmy Kimmel Live regarding Charlie Kirk’s assassination, ABC suspended the show’s production for nearly a week. A perfect storm of government censorship and corporate corruption led to forced suspension someone’s free speech regarding a person whom they emphasize was punished for his free speech. Taking further notes from the White House’s tacky video tribute to Kirk, it seems that the Trump administration sees any sort of criticism or mildly negative portrayal of Kirk as horribly inappropriate and ill-placed.

Since Kirk’s assassination at Utah Valley University, there has been immense public discussion about free speech, political violence, and Kirk himself. In a quote that has been particularly scrutinized since his murder, Kirk said in 2023 that “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.” I disagree, including in Kirk’s own case. Neither Kirk nor anyone else should die as some unavoidable byproduct of our right to bear arms. Based on the same graphs on gun-related deaths that we’ve been looking at for decades, the U.S. is unique among wealthy countries in its obscene levels of gun violence, and Kirk consistently supported policies that would only make gun violence in this country more likely. 

However, many accounts of Kirk’s life and advocacy are a saccharine portrayal of a man who only cared about freedom of speech and civil discourse. Conservatives have been taking the time to emphasize the importance of protecting freedom of speech, but those same ruthless First Amendment defenders don’t seem all too interested in the speech Kirk actually espoused. For example, the fact that Kirk claimed that “all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people” is absent from many of his eulogies. Instead, those remembering Kirk often turn to complaints over the apparent suppression of conservative perspectives or sweet nothings about the vital nature of debate to our democracy. 

This whitewashing of Kirk’s legacy is not unique to those who agreed with Kirk’s position. Ezra Klein of The New York Times insists that “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way,” and a WashU student writing in Student Life, not touching on their personal feelings about Kirk’s politics, accuses people of “erasing [Kirk’s] history of championing democratic debate.” In these rosy pictures of Kirk’s legacy as a free speech warrior, we are left with little mention of Kirk’s horrific statements about Islam, gender-affirming healthcare, abortion, Black people, “Jewish money,” or a host of other topics whose full inclusion here would make this article quite disgusting to read. Looking at Kirk’s explicit comments about the importance of debate obscures just how little he cared about others’ civil rights and human dignity. 

Some defenders of Kirk’s legacy might attempt to return to Kirk’s own insistence on the value of civil debate. And certainly, there are plenty of quotes where Kirk advocates for democratic debate. However, lacing his arguments with cliché niceties about the importance of open debate doesn’t erase his advocacy against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or his claim that certain Black women in positions of power simply do not have “the brain processing power to be taken seriously.” Free speech? Certainly. Speech that represents the very best of our democracy and civil discourse? Certainly not.

If this is supposed to be politics “the right way,” I can only imagine how despicable things need to get for Ezra Klein to call them “wrong.”  Furthermore, it seems that those wanting to prop up Kirk’s reputation have been forced to cherry-pick the most milquetoast comments about healthy democracy and exclusively mention those, so as to not allow his full-throated bigotry to dominate the narrative. Author Ta-Nehisi Coates points this out in Klein’s article, writing that “for all his praise, there was not a single word in the piece from Kirk himself.” In effect, Coates argues, Kirk’s actual positions were so abhorrent and presented with such little regard for his interlocutors that any substantive quotes are essentially non-eulogizable. 

Anyone who decides that the best way to honor Charlie Kirk’s life is to misconstrue his advocacy and forget what he stood for is likely deeply misguided about what it means to honor the dead. Either that, or they are painfully aware that Kirk’s true beliefs would not be heralded as the gleaming examples of civil advocacy that many sources might have you believe. People scrubbing his reputation evidently don’t care about making their remembrances accurate, just more easily digestible for the general public. In this case, being honest about Kirk’s character would only reveal how much hate and divisiveness he infused into U.S. political discourse.

Kirk believed that a nonzero number of innocent people dying every year was a worthy price to pay for absurdly permissive gun policies to be maintained. I disagree. And even though I disagree, you will not find me dancing over Kirk’s grave — or anyone’s grave for that matter. But you will equally not find me whitewashing his legacy to ignore his massive contributions to the hellscape of reactionary politics in this country. Kirk’s support for policies that harm people was something he was happy to talk about when he was alive; it was clearly exactly what he wanted to be remembered for. I intend to carry the full picture of Kirk’s legacy with me, no matter how many people with conveniently short memories try to convince us that all he really wanted was a conversation.